Premiers of India, Pakistan Meet Briefly

The leaders of India and Pakistan met Wednesday for the first time since testing atomic weapons and walked away promising to keep working toward easing tensions between their two nations.

Prime Ministers Atal Behari Vajpayee of India and Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan disclosed few details of their private 45-minute meeting but said they had ordered their foreign ministers to plan more talks.

The encounter, however brief and thin on substance, was eagerly awaited in the West and throughout South Asia, where the two nations’ rivalry has suddenly raised the specter of nuclear war.

It injected the supple words of diplomacy into a relationship that only weeks ago was marked by bullying and belligerence.

“The inescapable reality that confronts us today is that South Asia is now nuclearized,” Sharif told a gathering of leaders from across the region. “It is for us to steer away from the gathering storm.”

Held in this heavily guarded tropical capital, where soldiers peer over sandbagged checkpoints on every corner, the Vajpayee-Sharif meeting stole the show from what promised to be a humdrum gathering of the seven nations of South Asia. The talks between the two prime ministers were the first formal discussions between the governments of India and Pakistan since September 1997.

Since May, when India and Pakistan tested atomic devices, the nuclear arms issue has dominated public discourse and plunged the two countries’ economies into disarray. Stung by U.S. sanctions, the currencies and stock markets of the two nations have tumbled, and Pakistan is threatening to suspend payments on its foreign debt.

The brief burst of public enthusiasm in Pakistan and India after the tests has given way to widespread alarm and despair.

Yet for all the urgency, there seemed to be little hope Wednesday that Vajpayee and Sharif could resolve the underlying issues that have fueled the enmity between India and Pakistan for the past half a century.

Principal among those is Kashmir, the Himalayan region claimed by Pakistan and India and occupied in part by both. A byproduct of the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, Kashmir is the source of two of the three wars the countries have fought since their independence in 1947. Today, the armies of Pakistan and India regularly shell each other across the border, and Pakistan continues to support an insurgency in Indian-occupied Kashmir that has killed more than 20,000 people since 1989.

The tit-for-tat struggles over Kashmir have taken on a new urgency now that the two countries have tested nuclear weapons.

Successive Pakistani governments have called on a third country--perhaps the U.S.--to mediate the dispute over Kashmir. India, with an army twice the size of Pakistan’s, insists that the dispute be resolved between them.

While Pakistan has kept alive the hope of regaining all of Kashmir, India has seemed willing to freeze the status quo. India occupies about two-thirds of Kashmir, Pakistan about a third.

In a news conference after his meeting with the Indian prime minister, Sharif sought to downplay the prospect of a diplomatic breakthrough.

“India has to show some flexibility on Kashmir,” Sharif said. “Kashmir is the sole cause of tension.”

Vajpayee declined to address the Kashmir issue but instead stressed the need for all the countries of the region to develop their economic relations.

“Let us now grow rich together,” he told participants at the South Asia Assn. for Regional Cooperation, which also includes Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and the Maldives.

Since the Indian and Pakistani nuclear tests in May, the Clinton administration has led the effort to isolate the two countries by imposing limited economic sanctions.

Administration officials say they will consider lifting the sanctions if each side declares a moratorium on nuclear tests and forswears deployment of nuclear weapons.

In Washington, White House officials welcomed word that the prime ministers agreed to resume formal talks.